Pluto will steal your heart: NASA exposes 'most detailed' image ever

This image of Pluto from New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI)
(Credits: NASA-JHUAPL-SWRI) / NASA

Pluto has a huge “heart” as revealed in a new and the “most detailed” image of Pluto ever, received from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft as the flyby sequence of science observations has got officially underway.

The US space agency said scientists received this stunning view
of Pluto in the early hours of July 8. It said the image, snapped
by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), was taken the
day before, when the spacecraft was less than 5 million miles (8
million kilometers) from Pluto.

According to NASA, it's the first image to be received since the
July 4 anomaly, which had sent the spacecraft into safe mode. The
view is mainly focused on the area that will be seen in close-up
during New Horizons’ July 14 (Bastille Day).

“This side of Pluto is dominated by three broad regions of
varying brightness. Most prominent are an elongated dark feature
at the equator, informally known as ‘the whale’, and a large
heart-shaped bright area measuring some 1,200 miles (2,000
kilometers) across on the right. Above those features is a polar
region that is intermediate in brightness,” the agency
explained.

Jeff Moore, geologist, geophysicist and imaging team leader of
NASA’s Ames Research Center, has promised that the next time
scientists get to see this part of Pluto a “portion of this
region will be imaged at about 500 times better resolution than
we see today.”